Menu

Author: VHiStory

Hooray! I posted the trailer for this a little while ago, and said I hoped I had the full programme. Well here it is.

Before the programme starts, there’s the end of Doctors at Large.

There’s a very short piece for the BBC 75th anniversary, with Damian Hirst talking about the titles for Doctor Who, and a cucumber and vaseline.

Then, Horizon – The Computer that Ate Hollywood.

Peter Capaldi narrates, and talks about the birth of a new star: The computer generated actor. This is the image they choose to illustrate this statement.

You’d think they could have chosen something that had been created in the last two decades. This looks like work from the early 70s.

The great thing about these shows is seeing all those faces that you normally only read about in Cinefex magazine, or even in the Computer Graphics textbooks that we all had on our bookshelves.

The programme uses Titanic as an exemplar of a movie using CGI to move the art forward, so we get some nice behind the scenes footage of the shoot. Here’s Robert Legato, who started out on Star Trek The Next Generation, and went on to Cameron’s effects house Digital Domain.

Cameron himself talks about his approach to the film and the effects.

There’s a look at the history of traditional special effects, including optical pioneer Linwood Dunn

I love this illusion – the Emms room. This is achieved using false perspective and a weirdly shaped room.

Ed Catmull talks about his early work at the university of Utah.

Dennis Muren, of ILM

VS Ramachandran talks about capturing motion.

John Lasseter talks about how important story and character are to Pixar movies, over and above the technology behind the movies.

Here’s CGI Marilyn, a research project from the University of Geneva which, unfortunately, looks a couple of generations behind even the other stuff being done at this time. And Oh My God did they really have to have all her clothes literally blow off?

Some more Deep Space Nine now, and because this batch of tapes is a few years after our last visit, we’ve jumped forward in the series quite drastically. I do worry with DS9 that I’m not appreciating the arc of the story by watching it in this way, but the needs of the blog mean that’s how it should be.

The first episode here is A Time To Stand and it’s the first episode of the sixth series. Even just scrubbing through the video tells me that things must be getting dramatic, as they’ve adopted the grey Starfleet uniforms.

This recording cuts off most of the teaser, so I’m grateful that I can watch the whole thing on Netflix, so that I get the ‘last time’ catch-up which is rather vital, given I’ve missed about three seasons of politics and war.

And it’s rather dramatic. The Cardassians and the Jem Hadar are working together and attacking the station in scenes which are way more impressive than we’re used to on DS9 – clearly digital effects at this stage have improved mightily.

But the end of the previous season saw the command crew of DS9 having to abandon the station, and this episode sees them finally having shaken off Dominion pursuit.

On the station, Kira has remained. Jeffrey Combs is the Dominion’s representative Weyoun, and his relationship with Gul Dukat isn’t starting off well.

Brock Peters is Sisko’s dad, and he’s upset that Sisko left Jake on DS9 when they evacuated, which we’re told was Jake’s choice.

Kira and Odo are trying to play Weyoun against Dukat.

Sisko and his crew are sent on a mission to destroy a plant producing the drugs that the Jem Hadar need to fight, but their ship is damaged after the explosion, and they’re trapped in Dominion space without warp drive.

This tape skips the next episode, so next here is Sons and Daughters.

It opens with Dax and Worf smooching. What is it with Worf that made the Star Trek creators want him to hook up with every attractive woman around?

Worf’s son Alexander has signed up for a Klingon ship. But he has difficulty integrating with the other Klingons.

God I hate Klingon episodes. A Klingon ship is the very definition of a hostile work environment. No wonder they lose all the time.

The next episode is Behind the Lines. I recognise this Starbase model. Is it the one that was used way back in Star Trek II?

Kiora learns that the Cardassians have a plan to disable the minefield that’s keeping the wormhole closed, so they try to prevent it, but Odo is too busy ‘in the link’ with another changeling to disable an alarm, so Rom gets captured. Looks like Odo might be turning bad.

The next episode is Favor the Bold.

Sisko has a plan to recapture DS9.

Odo is still entertaining the female changeling. “So, that is how the solids enjoy intimacy.” It all comes down to sex, somehow.

Sisko’s plan to retake DS9 has to be brought forward when they learn the Cardassians will have the minefield disabled within a week.

They’re definitely making the most of the digital tools at their disposal now. You’d never have got that many ships on screen on the earlier seasons.

This episode ends on a cliffhanger, as Sisko’s fleet encounters the Dominion fleet, which outnumbers them two to one.

The tape ends with the start of an episode of Sliders. I never watched Sliders, but I get the feeling it was fun.

After a bit of this episode, the recording stops and underneath there’s a bit of an episode of South Park. The tape ends shortly into this.

Recording switches shortly into this programme and we have an episode of Father Ted called Speed 3.

Dougal was judging the Baby Parade, and Ted complains he shouldn’t have got them so agitated.

Mr Doyle is reading about interior design.

And is slightly infatuated with the milkman, Pat Mustard, who’s a bit of a ladies’ man.

Ted thinks that all the ugly, hairy babies at the baby parade might be Pat Mustard’s babies. So he and Dougal stake him out.

They get him sacked, and Dougal has to take over the round. But Pat has put a bomb on the milk float, and if the float goes over 4mph the bomb is armed, and if it drops below 4mph it will go off. The stunts are amazing.

Co Writer Arthur Mathews is a priest.

Next, another Father Ted. This is The Mainland. Ted and Dougal go on a trip, and meet Richard Wilson.

Graham Norton pretends to be a ghost.

The next episode starts with a ‘Previously On’ revealing the title, Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse.

I love Bishop Brennan running towards Craggy Island Parochial House when he’s realised that Ted really did kick him up the arse.

Next it’s Night of the Nearly Dead. Mrs Doyle wins a chance to meet her heartthrob, Eoin McLove, but all the women in town descend on the house when they learn he’s going to be there.

Ted gets to answer questions about William Shatner’s Tek War.

The next episode is the last in the series, Going to America. Ted gets an offer to move to Los Angeles. Will he leave Dougal, Father Frank and Mrs Doyle behind?

After this, recording continues, with an episode of Frasier. A handsome new presenter joins the radio station, and everyone loves him. He’s perfect at everything, and Frasier can’t help being jealous, until he learns he can’t sing.

After this, recording continues for a bit with the start of an episode of King of the Hill. Then the tape ends.

This tape starts with the end of Out of Hours featuring a young Dominic West.

There’s a trailer for Close Relations. And a trailer for Inside Story about John Diamond and his Cancer.

Then, an episode of The Human Body, Robert Winston’s documentary series. The opening titles are, with a bit of judicious blurring, quite frank, with a lot of naked people in a forest.

This episode is Raging Teens and looks at puberty. “We all make the journey, and it can be a bumpy ride.” Cut to Professor Robert Winston in a rollercoaster.

I’m trying to remember which comedy show it was that poked fun at Prof Winston, and the programme’s dogged insistence on illustrating metaphors and comparisons as literally as possible. It had the catchphrase “When really, I should be working.”

“If my taste buds were as sensitive [as hormone detectors] I’d be able to detect a pinch of salt in a swimming pool.”

The programme actually shows an erection, albeit using a thermal imaging camera. I think that was controversial at the time.

This programme was most definitely from a time when digital colour grading was new, and programme makers felt the need to press ALL THE BUTTONS.

There’s an introduction by Richard Jobson to this film, which sounds oddly like he’s trying to reassure viewers that a film about actors talking about acting isn’t as boring as it sounds.

Looking for Richard is a film by Al Pacino, in which he talks to a lot of people, and does a lot of acting, and talking about acting. Ther’s a lot of famous faces, like Kevin Spacey

Kenneth Branagh

Kevin Kline

James Earl Jones

F Murray Abraham

Derek Jacobi

John Gielgud

Vanessa Redgrave

Alec Baldwin

Director Peter Brook

Winona Ryder

Viveca Lindfors

Aidan Quinn

There’s a slight sense of chaos about the film. around all the discussion about the play, and the staging of many scenes, in costume, there’s also the occasional discussion between Pacino and his team about what the film is supposed to be. It has the vague feel of a Nick Broomfield documentary. When they visit the room Shakespeare was born in, they somehow set off a fire alarm and the fire brigade turn up.

It’s quite charming seeing an American cast talking about the play. British actors always tend to seem like they’ve been immersed in Shakespeare since infanthood, and their knowledge of the play is absolute. But Pacino and his actors aren’t afraid to admit the gaps in their knowledge, which helps with the sense that this film really is about finding the play.

I’m afraid the lowbrow in me did laugh during the final battle scene, when Richard takes an arrow in the back, and all I can think of is Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Message for you sir.”

The score, by Howard Shore, is also very good.

After this, there’s a brief trailer for Contact, and the tape ends. Another short tape today.

OK, so nobody’s perfect. But with computers, there are ways of spotting your mistakes.

I was doing some work on my tapes database, and I noticed a few anomalies with the data. First, I noticed that a lot of tapes that I knew I’d written blog entries about weren’t marked as blogged in the database. I have a semi manual process with the database, where I have to periodically tell it to scrape the blog feed, see which entries are new since it last looked, and store details about those entries in the database. But it turned out there was a big hole, close to a hundred entries that were in the blog but hadn’t been marked in the database.

I think it was due to the way I scrape the feed – I just look at the RSS feed for the blog, and that is limited to a fixed number of entries. So I clearly left the manual updating process so long that a number of unlogged entries dropped off the end of the feed.

So that was fixable, with another bit of blog scraping.

But today, I noticed that another part of my data, the records showing archived tape filenames and data from the hard drives I’m using, seemed to have some wrong data – the filestamps on the files were wrong, so some of the data was in slightly the wrong order. But that, again, was easily fixable just by uploading a new scan from the drive.

Then, I looked at the database, wanting to get an idea of which archived tapes were coming up, so I eliminated all the blogged tapes, then put them in order and I discovered that there were a couple of archived tapes that I’d actually missed when going through the hard drives. I’ve no idea why, since it’s fairly easy to keep track of the order.

So here is one of those missing tapes, as an extra treat, since the Three Tenors tape was a short one, and it’s a lovely movie, Cocoon.

It concerns the residents of an old people’s home, populated by some great actors of bygone days.

There’s Don Ameche

Wilford Brimley

and Hume Cronyn.

The trio regularly break into the empty house nearby to swim in their pool. But their plans are spoiled when a group of strangers, led by Brian Dennehy, who want to rent it for 26 days.

They also rent a boat from Steve Guttenberg, and go diving off the coast, pulling up some strange rocks from the ocean floor and storing them in the swimming pool.

But the old men keep swimming, and start feeling literally rejuvenated. Hume Cronyn even finds his cancer in remission.

But aboard the boat, while spying on young Tahnee Welch (daugher of Raquel) Steve Guttenberg discovers the true nature of Dennehy’s group.

When Guttenberg finally calms down, Dennehy explains that, yes, they are aliens, and they’ve come back to Earth because they had an outpost here thousands of years ago, but had to leave in a hurry, and part of the crew were left here, cocooned in the strange rocks they are excavating.

Soon after, the old folks are swimming in the pool when Dennehy’s group returns early, and while hiding in a closet they too see the true nature of the group.

Their swimming routine is curtailed, and soon Cronyn’s cancer is back, so Brimley begs Dennehy to let them swim again, and he reluctantly agrees. Soon, the group are full of vigour again, although it’s not always positive – Cronyn is so invigorated, he goes and cheats on wife Jessica Tandy.

Steve Guttenberg gets to have alien sex with Welch.

But the lusty old folk are attracting too much attention from the other residents of the home, and they figure out where their rejuvenation is coming from, and descend en masse on the pool. They even pull out a cocoon and start banging it on the side. Dennehy returns and orders them all out, but two of the cocoons are damaged, and one of the occupants dies in his arms.

The influx of old people has drained the pool of its lifeforce, and Dennehy and his team can no longer revive his crew.

There’s a heartbreaking scene, with Jack Gilford, and his senile wife Herta Ware. He’s been against the idea of using the pool from the beginning, but then his wife dies in bed, and he takes her to the pool, trying to revive her.

Brimley and his friends help Dennehy return the cocoons to the ocean before their spaceship returns, and as a thank you, Dennehy offers the old folks passage on the ship, where they would potentially live forever. “You’d be students, but also teachers.”

There’s a slightly contrived dramatic ending, as a boatful of old folks heads out to sea, pursued by the US coastguard, but they get away thanks to fog created by the incoming spaceship, featuring some classic old-school ILM cloud tank effects.

I’d almost forgotten how great this film is. It just shows you what dividends you get when you cast a movie with older actors. All the performances are exquisite and feel real, and it’s not surprising Don Ameche won an Oscar for his part.

It’s lovely to see a film that just has goodness at its core, with no villains. And it’s great to see a film that deals with aging in a fairly sensitive way. Ron Howard is a director who, I feel, doesn’t get enough credit for the fine work he does. I’ve enjoyed his movies right back to things like Splash and Night Shift, and Apollo 13 is my favourite film of all time. Hell, I even enjoy the DaVinci Code movies. It’s not surprising that Disney turned to him when they needed someone to take over on the Han Solo movie after they parted company with the original directors.

After this, recording continues with an ITN bulletin. The lead story is the discovery of a bomb under the car of a British serviceman in West Germany.

Also, trouble at the Notting Hill Carnival. There’s also a report about the launch of the BSB satellite.

Then, the tape runs out during Hollywood Ghost Stories, much like the recent Hammer programme. It’s hosted by John Carradine.

It features contributions from Exorcist author William Peter Blatty, about a haunting on the set of the film.

It’s quite a fun programme, which also features Frank De Felitta talking about the ‘events’ that led to him writing The Entity.

Actress Elke Sommer talks about the haunted house she lived in for a time. It attracted media attention, although perhaps this magazine isn’t the most reputable, given the story immediately above hers.

Also covered here is the Amityville Horror. The tape ends before the programme does.

And literally seconds after the recording stopped, my young son came into the living room to tell us he thinks the house is haunted, because he heard a voice upstairs and the bathroom door opened slightly with nobody there. He had no idea I was watching this programme as he’s been in another room with headphones on.

I don’t believe in ghosts. But if I’m murdered by one in my bed, avenge me.

Adverts:

Maxwell House

UniBond All Purpose

Persil

M&Ms

trail: Hollywood Ghost Stories

White Label

Cook Electric

Anchor Butter

Togs

Bernard Matthews Turkey Drummers

trail: French Fields

Nat West – I thought adverts were supposed to be aspirational. Who’d aspire to be this person?

Kodacolor Gold

Timotei

Marathon

Tetley Round Tea Bags

Hamlet

trail: War & Remembrance

Tennent’s LA

See No Evil Hear No Evil in cinemas

Kellogg’s Common Sense Oat Bran Flakes – were these later rebranded as Fruit & Fibre?

Well, here’s a tape with just one thing on it. It’s the Three Tenors concert from the 1998 World Cup, shown live on the afternoon before the match, in Paris.

Just so we don’t frighten off the normals, the concert is introduced by Desmond Lynam, and the voiceover too has obviously been told to make it football friendly, with comments like “An aria from Italy, the first great footballing nation to be represented in song today.”

The concert is conducted by James Levine of the New York Met – the Opera House, not the baseball team. (I had to google whether the Mets were baseball or not.)

And the three tenors, in case you’ve never seen them, are Jose Carreras

Placido Domingo

and Luciano Pavarotti.

I’ll just note that the ‘make it football friendly’ edict didn’t extend to subtitling the songs. Or perhaps subtitles would have frightened off the facepainted punters.

There’s an interval, during which they waste little time talking about music – it’s all about the football.

When the encores start, the oleaginous commentator keeps saying “I’m sure we know what’s coming next” and “There’s only one way to end this concert of the century” which I presume means we should expect an encore of Nessun Dorma, but they keep doing loads of other songs as encores. I wonder if he’s not got a list of what the encores will be? And in fact, it never comes.

So it’s down to Des Lynam to remind us that there’s a football match on later, and some fireworks finish off the show.